Tweetdeck, the popular app for Twitter, offers a very useful search feature that helps you discover the more popular (viral) tweets for any search term very easily. While setting up a search column inside Tweetdeck (see screenshot), you can define an “engagement level” so that tweets that have been retweeted or favorited at least ‘n’ times only show up in the search results.

The engagement filter surfaces the best tweets and removes the noise from Twitter search results but the most surprising part is that Twitter has not made this filter available outside Tweetdeck. You don’t even have it inside the official Twitter app.

Well, here’s the trick. You can actually filter tweets by engagement level on the Twitter website or inside any Twitter app using an undocumented search operator that Twitter doesn’t want us to know about.

Go to the Twitter search box, type any search term and append the operator min_retweets:[number] or min_faves:[number] to filter your search results. For instance, here’s a sample search that will only shows tweets pointing to the labnol.org domain that have been favorited or retweeted at least 5 times.

labnol.org min_retweets:5 OR min_faves:5

If you are brand manager trying to find out the most viral tweets generated for an event or a content, the min_retweets and min_faves search operators may save you several hours. You can also archive tweets to a Google Spreadsheet automatically.

You can further enhance your search queries with search operators like filter:news to show tweets emanating from news sources or use filter:images to only show tweets that contain images.

Amit Agarwal is a web geek and founder of Digital Inspiration, a popular tech & how-to website. He has been blogging for over a decade and has also contributed to the Wall Street Journal, Lifehacker and The Financial Express. Sign-up for the email newsletter for your daily dose of tips & tutorials.